Still, the most remarkable performance at the Cherry Lane is by Peter Friedman, who plays the kind of father you rarely see in art: a good one. It’s a hard sort of acting to describe, a spectacle of humility and self-awareness, unshowy and confident. A businessman with a genial, chatty energy, Mae’s father, facing mortality, is eager to help his daughter to know him better, not as a child but as an adult, to create a closeness that she clearly craves but is frightened of. As she raises walls, he builds bridges—and she scrambles across, absorbing bits of wisdom, a few of which feel tied to her secret thoughts about control. At one point, he startles her by explaining that, unlike her, he’s not terrified of feeling helpless: “Like going to the dentist. I love that. You just lie back and open your mouth. What can you do?”
Late in the show, Friedman’s character plays his daughter the song “Firewood,” by Regina Spektor, a songwriter whose work—droll and ardent—shares a lot with Barron’s play. It’s his cancer theme song, he explains; her mom had also had one. “You guys were weird,” she tells him—it’s Mae’s reflex word, her way of shooing away excess feeling. “Some of the lyrics are a little overdramatic, but I think it’s a pretty good song,” he adds, excitedly; he wants her to listen. She is reluctant to do it, but then she does it anyway, absorbing the song’s rapturous optimism. The audience does, too: we listen to that song all the way through, feeling the time pass.
Wallace Shawn’s haunting “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” directed by his long-term creative partner, André Gregory, is less a piñata play than it is a public autopsy, in which a family of erudite, self-possessed medical examiners stand over the corpse of their own legacy, poking it gently. There are four people implicated in the crime: Dick (Josh Hamilton), a rich, famous, charming, and extroverted New York novelist; Elle (Maria Dizzia), his saintly but quietly furious public-school-teacher wife, whom he fell for when he was sixteen; Tim, their squirrelly pervert of a son (played with the worst mustache in history by the delightful John Early), and Elaine (Hope Davis), Dick’s lover, a misanthrope with a clear-eyed understanding of her own choices.
It’s explosive material that, in a different artist’s hands, might have inspired a third-act screaming match over an Upper East Side dinner table, with snifters flying. Instead, Shawn stages his story as a panel of intimate testimonies, confided to us alone. The four characters sit on chairs, facing the audience. Sometimes they hold mugs. As the spotlight settles on each of them, that person unspools a monologue, a candid account of their origins, their desires and dreams, their galaxy of excuses and explanations. These stories slowly form a cracked family portrait, like a jigsaw puzzle. Are the characters speaking to us from beyond the grave? Perhaps. Overhead, images of moths float by—a reference to “moth day,” which, Dick confides, with a nostalgic smile, is the phrase he invented as a small child to describe the day we die, guided to the grave, “vaguely and flutteringly,” by blind moths. Then he tells us how it felt to die.
Going in, I’d assumed that “Moth Days” would be Shawn’s first whack at his own family piñata, one that involves this magazine. Shawn’s father was William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, referred to by the staff, worshipfully, as Mr. Shawn; after his death, at eighty-five, Lillian Ross, one of his star reporters, wrote a memoir revealing their decades-long affair. “What We Did Before Our Moth Days” is, it’s true, a play about an adult son who is wrestling with his famous father’s secret life. A key story is strikingly similar to a story from Ross’s memoir: Elaine rushes to Elle’s apartment after Dick’s death, then meets Tim at the door, as if she were a vampire requesting permission to enter. But the parallels aren’t precise; they’re more like images in a mirror that’s slyly tilted to disorient the viewer. Dick, played by Hamilton with a boyish glee, is a chipper, gregarious sybarite, while Mr. Shawn was an introvert’s introvert. Similarly, Early’s dissolute failson feels less like a self-portrait than like a darkly comic deflection, a gargoyle-ish stand-in for his creator’s anxieties. (I was reminded of the rule that, when you write a roman à clef, you should give your enemy a small penis, since he’ll never say that it’s him.)
